As of right now, we are making The Western Standard completely free for everyone, all the way until Election Day. We re able to do that because thousands of Westerners pitched in to donate and offset the cost of foregone new subscriptions and our extra election-related costs.
00:00:00.000As of right now, we are making the Western standard completely free for everyone, all the way until Election Day.
00:00:11.280We're able to do that because thousands of Westerners pitched in to donate and offset the cost of foregone new subscriptions and our extra election-related costs.
00:00:20.300It all began last Friday when I was emailed by a few guys in Alberta and BC who pledged to donate $1,000 each if we would remove the paywall for the next month.
00:00:30.900Their pledges were very generous, but by themselves not enough.
00:00:35.060But they got me thinking, and so we reached out to our members and asked them to join the original pledges to raise $75,000.
00:00:45.340My staff and I watched over the weekend, and the donations kept coming in, and so I gave the green light last night to take down the paywall effective this morning.
00:00:55.700This is an opportunity to reach millions of people with independent, straight news, and hard-hitting opinion columns.
00:01:02.320Last month, in March, we had 2.1 million readers, and that was with the pesky paywall still up.
00:01:08.360With the Western standard now entirely free for everyone to read, I strongly expect that we'll reach many, many more people.
00:01:15.340As Western Canada's leading independent media source, we have reporters and columnists scattered everywhere from Victoria, BC to, figuratively at least, Flinflon, Manitoba.
00:01:25.120But we are a bit short of staff out east.
00:01:27.500That's why we have hired a temporary new reporter in Ontario, and we're sending one of our Calgary-based reporters, Jen Hodgson, eastward into exile.
00:01:34.820This is important, because outside of coastal BC and Edmonton, where we already have full-time reporters stationed, this election will not be fought in the West.
00:01:44.900The party leaders simply won't be spending very much of their time in Calgary, rural Alberta, and pretty much anywhere in Saskatchewan.
00:01:50.820Instead, they'll be tripping over each other in Ontario, and the GTA in particular.
00:01:57.320Therefore, it was necessary for us to reallocate some of our resources from the West to the East.
00:02:03.960And if that sounds familiar, it probably should.
00:02:06.240The overwhelming majority of Canada's media is headquartered out of the Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal triangle.
00:02:12.000And they reflect the views and the news of the centre, them, to the periphery, us.
00:02:18.880This was most recently obvious when the legacy media blew gasket every single time that a Westerner piped up with demands of our own.
00:02:27.220The Western Standard has always seen its mission as sending Western journalists into the lion's den and reporting back to the readers that it serves.
00:02:35.640I am proud to lead a team of journalists who know who they serve and what our mission is.
00:02:41.260And I'm grateful to all of you who stepped up to pitch in financially and make it possible for us to make the Western Standard free for this election.